Martin Bandyke Under Covers for May 2020: Martin interviews Andrew Blauner, editor of The Peanuts Papers: Writers and Cartoonists on Charlie Brown, Snoopy and the Gang, and the Meaning of Life.

From the publisher: Over the span of 50 years, Charles M. Schulz created a comic strip that is one of the indisputable glories of American popular culture - hilarious, poignant, inimitable. Some 20 years after the last strip appeared, the characters Schulz brought to life in Peanuts continue to resonate with millions of fans, their beguiling four-panel adventures and television escapades offering lessons about happiness, friendship, disappointment, childhood, and life itself. In The Peanuts Papers, 33 writers and artists (including Jonathan Lethem, Ann Patchett, Adam Gopnik and George Saunders) reflect on the deeper truths of Schulz’s deceptively simple comic, its impact on their lives and art and on the broader culture. These enchanting, affecting, and often quite personal essays show just how much Peanuts means to its many admirers - and the ways it invites us to ponder, in the words of Sarah Boxer, “how to survive and still be a decent human being” in an often bewildering world. Featuring essays, memoirs, poems, and two original comic strips, here is the ultimate listener's companion for every Peanuts fan. Martin’s interview with Andrew Blauner was originally recorded on November 26, 2019.